Brant does it again.

Being serious for a second, I want to take advantage of an opportunity to be encouraging to a friend, and introduce Brant to anyone who doesn't know him. Brant is a good-hearted and thoughtful guy. He has a strong tendency to use his mind in constructive ways, and to use it often. He doesn't just go off and theorize, he listens to writers and to people that he talks with. He's a guy looking for good thoughts. And he does it all with a great sense of humor.

Oh, and he's not afraid to raise issues and ask questions others won't, or won't do very well. He does both.

Becoming charismatic (again)

In response to some patient friends who might stop visiting if I don't post some of my life on this blog . . .

I haven't, for several years now, been quite the "charismatic" that I used to be. Not that my theology changed (in theory), I just wasn't living it. I don't know what "charismatic" means to you. Maybe it means rolling around on the floor (which I've personally never done), but here's what I mean by it, in terms of practice and attitude:

• My praise and adoration for God aren't just in my head--I put my body and my heart into worshipping God and present myself for whatever he wants, publicly and privately. And I do it regularly and with a certain lack of dignity where helpful. (I have a sense of my own dignity that grows like a weed. I find that being undignified, or being willing to be so, in my worship or service of Jesus helps--Look up the definitions of "extol" and "exalt" or even "worship" if you need some biblical basis, and there's more besides.)
• This giving of my emotional, mental and bodily attention and my offer of service to God (my whole being) has pretty nifty side effects. The more I do it, the less I care about my stuff and the more "the peace of Christ rules my heart"; the more I am unoffendable, impossible to threaten with harm. I know where/who my favorite persons are, who and where I am, and who's ultimately in charge of things here. This personal peace means my walls come down. I don't even care about how people see me, nor does bad news typically shake me, though it might sadden me. I become genuinely present and compassionate with people--and I actually see them. Not being consumed with my needs does wonders. I basically begin to just have "extra" love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, etc.--that Holy Spirit is quite the fellow.
• This actual caring for others and simultaneously communing with God leads to praying for others' needs and hearing God's thoughts about and for other people. I become a physical location through which God communes with people, and they see and hear from him as well. I become the temple of God. A few important subpoints here: First, of course this praying/listening to God for others includes times when I'm alone, but it's also when I'm with people. I'm really looking at and listening to the person I'm with, and I'm doing the same with God at the very same time. It's amazing the things God has to say to people and the effects are equally amazing, miraculous even. Some might say to me at this point, "Doesn't that make it harder to hear the person you're with if you're trying to talk with God at the same time?" Not once you get used to it. And getting used to it usually means actually coming to terms with the fact that God is always part of your conversations anyway. He always has been, we just don't always acknowledge or believe in or accept his presence in the way we do a physical person. And/or we don't assume he has anything to say, or we assume he only wants to say things that are in tracts, or is limited to quoting scripture. Once you come to terms with the reality of his active, creative presence (whether we like it or not), and that he's got a pretty large vocabulary and repertoire of available actions and emotions, it's just a matter of time. It becomes a matter of not being rude and ignoring someone who's right there; someone who happens to have more insight than either of you, someone who loves you both like no one else does or can. Which brings me to my second subpoint: God's communications are "wholistic", for lack of a better term, just like he is and you are. They've got feeling. They've got a human touch. He grips you with his thoughts and his feelings for someone so that you can communicate the whole package. We don't typically believe God will do this through us, but we long for him deeply to communicate to us in this way. There's a clue there via the Golden Rule. God's best vehicle to communicate himself isn't a billboard or a pamphlet or a book; it's not even the Bible. His best vehicle is a living human being who embodies and obeys him. Obviously, Jesus was and is the prototype, but God's taking on flesh and bone didn't end with Jesus. It just began there. We are his living, acting, thinking, feeling sons and daughters, his vehicles of creative expression and action, or we are those of a much smaller inspiration. God doesn't just want to fill your mind with some logical point to be made in a mechanical fashion. He wants to fill you with a logical point that has unbelievable emotional and physical consequences. He wants empathy, for his feelings and those of others. He wants us to embody, to surrender to, to hear his message(s) with our whole being, and you won't have embodied all that he has to say in a hundred life-times, if you did it every second of every day. And then my final subpoint is a little more painful: he wants us to trust him, which in my experience has meant he didn't feel the need to explain the whole deal to me before directing me to act in a wholistic way on whatever he did give me. I was given the "strong leading" once to just hug a guy I barely knew in the middle of a worship song. Since I care about how people see me, and since this guy had his eyes closed, and probably didn't know my last name, I really wanted to give him a verbal warning like "Hey." or "Hi." first. But I got this sick feeling in my stomach like I was chickening out and disobeying God if I did that. So after sweating through one song and halfway through another one, I reluctantly hugged him, full on. And he hugged me back without ever knee-jerking away. And he broke down. And a tear or two came down my cheek as we kept embracing. For a while. After it was done he told me that his dad is one of those always tearing-him-down types and he was just saying to God before I hugged him, repeatedly, "I just need to know what you think of me."

These are things I've experienced but have let go of over the last 4 or 5 years. There are lots of reasons, but that's another post. I'm pursuing again a kind of wholistic practice of worship and love that I learned from some dear folks who were willing to be called charismatics. I hope to do the label justice soon, and be consistent out in the world that thinks it's alone. Thank you, Father, Son & Spirit, for your patience and for continuing to talk and act for me and for all of us. Thank you, Jesus.

Hilarious

I wouldn't know, but I hope that doing stuff this funny, even every once in a while, is rewarding for the people who create it for a living.

Go Sailfish!

Well, it's now semi-official (I met/interviewed with the dean of the business school, Bob Myers, who makes the decision, but the president officially sends the offer). I will be teaching Business Law at PBA starting in January as an adjunct professor. I am very excited, to say the least, especially after finding out what the school wants the students to get from the course. I'm pretty confident this is a God-engineered direction. A few high points in my mind:

• The thing the dean was most concerned with was how I planned on integrating a Theistic Christian worldview into the learning process. For example, I am specifically required to deal with things like "what constitutes success", "social responsibility", "conflict resolution" and the like from a Christian viewpoint and not just teach the legal playing field in a business context. The very thing I want to do--point to Jesus in an assumed secular field. Awesome.
• I am strongly encouraged to have fun, go crazy, experiment--if it works, great; if not, try again.
• I get to communicate with college students, at least some of which really want to talk about Jesus and how to follow him in their careers and elsewhere. I could really mention this one twice it's so good.
• It's a 3000 level (junior-level) required course. They fully anticipate not everyone will pass; they expect the course to be rigorous. I don't revel the idea of failing anyone, but it helps me to know that they (my dean, etc.) expect it to be hard, and accept the consequences of that. I get to structure the course however I want, so long as certain topics get covered. I'm thinking of what books to assign outside of the text. It might be The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright.
• Assignments, etc., can be given and posted electronically through "e-college." Will learn more about this, but not dealing with paper always excites me.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm excited, and humbled. It's a privilege.

This is a test

This is a test. This is a pics test. I wonder where the pic will show up (if it will at all) since I've never done this, and I'm only doing it now for a friend, who shall remain nameless, who's stuck in his crazy Xanga ways.

Options

"There are some things in life, and they may be the most important things, that we cannot know by research or reflection, but only by committing ourselves. We must dare in order to know." -- J.H. Oldham, Life is Commitment (1953)

I really dig this quote. I like it even more now than I used to. I am in the home stretch of this book, Colossians Remixed, and the authors (a husband and wife, coincidentally) make this off hand point about one of the traits of post-modern thinking is a desire for keeping options open (being more non-committal than the average Joe) and seeing value in various points of view and various paths. It is a special comfort to the postmodern mind to have, and to keep, all options open. Postmodern or not, I could immediately see how that desire plays itself out in several areas of my life and thinking—most for the better, but some not: I tend look before (and during and after) I leap; I can see some good in just about anything (and am equally convinced there's some bad in most things, too); I am convinced that there are several sides to every story (perspective is a powerful, powerful thing); I am good at many things, but great at nothing; and I tend to think that there are several solutions to any problem. This desire also makes me hesitant about committing full-force to anything, and even if I do, my eyes are constantly noticing should-be exceptions to my commitment or other paths (perhaps with greener grass, or at least with grass that's different in some way that I should experience); so I easily justify jumping ship and making a change of plans.

Like I said, for the most part, I like these traits in me. But when I read this "keeping options open" in the book, I immediately thought of how certain things (like marriage, for instance) require a total commitment to do them well. Basically, I saw how, despite making a decision (that I am happy with) to choose Jesus as my source, first, foremost and always, there is part of me that immediately feels threatened by even writing that—as if I'm going to miss out on something by making a whatever-it-takes commitment to Jesus. I realize that I've tried to live this out without being truly willing to permanently close other sources. I really want to keep my options open on the other stuff that I think must literally make me happy.

Being faithful to Kim is pretty easy for me for several reasons—I dig being married to her; from before I proposed I've had a deep conviction about it (whereby I strongly believe that both God and I were in agreement about me marrying her); I'm excited about where I believe our relationship is headed; I'm convinced of the gut-wrenching pain and heart-sickness of any alternative; and I tend to see the forks in the road that lead to unfaithfulness and tend to keep the heck away from even the forks. But with my marriage to God I don’t have the same watchfulness or care or honor for the marriage. I think it's a lack of vision of the value of the relationship, now and in the future. (It sounds silly and sad saying it, but that's what it is.)

To be committed in a marriage-way requires a permanent and ongoing shaping of your life cycles for and with the other; it forecloses certain options and paths (indefinitely) in order to make all kinds of joint options possible. Ruby is a perfect example of the kind of "things" that are possible for Kim and I together. Just as important, if not more so, there are innumerable "options" for Kim and I to model and explain love to Ruby that have our healthy marriage as a necessary condition. Anyway, this is exactly the way it is with God. He is the source of every good thing. Our exclusive union with Jesus is a prerequisite to having all kinds of options open to us—the kind of options that actually matter, the ones that give life to us and others. (Apart from him we can do nothing, according to Jesus.) But marrying God is just like marrying anyone--at least regarding the kind of decisions that give appropriate honor to the other and lead to fruitfulness in the marriage. I need to embrace this reality again, and happily and eagerly give up whatever it costs to have this marriage and honor this person, Jesus. I really feel like a heel, the way I guess you should when you've devalued a person you've said you love.

++ Lord, help me love you, honor you, as you deserve. ++

Unsettled Dust

If I wait for things to settle down before I blog again, it might be a few years, SO this will be blogging with dust still swirling.

I'm going to be checking out this site that Kyle reminded me of. Specifically, I'm going to order and read some of their seemingly short (definitely cheap) publications about missional churches. I'm really excited about the path I'm on and our church is on, and I think some of this stuff will be helpful—we'll see.

On a related note, I've been thinking a lot about 'call' lately. Part of the problem with concepts like 'call' is that they have a tendency to become loftily narrow in scope and archaic in feel and, therefore, inapplicable to everyday life and people. All religious concepts tend this way it seems. It's part of our bent (as American Christians) towards deism. It's part of our tendency to think of God as distant to our actual lives. This is one of the things that I am so grateful to the Vineyard movement for working against. God is present. The reign of God is at hand; it's among you. It's God's presence on earth, not yours in heaven, that is the good news of Jesus.

How alive do I think Jesus is right now? This is a question I use to pull myself out of a mindset that doesn't think of God as present and working. The answer sets the stage for thinking about 'call.' Call is literally just a fully alive and functioning Jesus asking people to join him in millions of ways and places all over the earth, to remake us and others into humanity as God intended. He does this everywhere, constantly, because he is alive and well and has this good agenda for his world. We have the choice to follow or ignore his many calls to better relationships, a better mindset, a better humanity. Call is everywhere and constantly happening because Jesus is everywhere and always working, until everything here is done the way God wants it. 'Everything' meaning business, family, friends, money, art to name a few.

The issue then is how we as individuals, families, professionals and organizations grasp and nurture a way of thinking that helps us regularly listen for and follow the voice of the true Shepherd of this world into the plethora of callings he will have for us in this lifetime for the good of all the world. I'm specifically wondering how my little church can do this for our group and each other, and I'm hopeful about hearing Jesus . . .